Hurricane Beryl barrelled toward Jamaica as a powerful Category 4 storm on Wednesday, after flattening homes and devastating agriculture on smaller islands in the eastern Caribbean, killing at least three people.

At around 0500 EDT (0900 GMT), the hurricane was about 300 km east-southeast of the Jamaican capital of Kingston, according the US National Hurricane Center (NHC), packing maximum sustained winds of 230 kmph.

“Beryl is expected to bring life-threatening winds and storm surge to Jamaica on Wednesday and the Cayman Islands on Wednesday night and Thursday,” NHC said in an advisory. A hurricane warning is in effect for both places.

Hurricane conditions are expected to reach the coast of Jamaica about midday local time, with tropical storm-strength winds from late morning, making outside preparations difficult or dangerous, it said.

In the capital Kingston, cars queued at petrol stations as people filled additional containers with fuel. Residents stocked up on water and other essential supplies and boarded up shops and houses.

“Yeah right now (we’re) worrying about the storm. You know it’s Category 5 and in Jamaica people are worried and always shopping and buying things as in this store,” Andre, a salesperson in a local store said, without giving his full name. The unusually early hurricane, whose rapid strengthening scientists said was likely fuelled by human-caused climate change, is expected to still be a hurricane when it passes near Jamaica and the Cayman Islands later this week.

Beryl, the 2024 Atlantic season’s first hurricane and the earliest storm on record to reach the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, felled power lines and unleashed flash floods across smaller islands.

The storm hit St. Vincent and the Grenadines especially hard, according to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves.

“The hurricane has come and gone, and it has left in its wake immense destruction,” he said. On one island in the Grenadines archipelago, Union Island, 90 per cent of homes had been “severely damaged or destroyed”, he said. The Prime Minister confirmed one death.

In a briefing on Tuesday, Grenada’s Prime Minister, Dickon Mitchell, said Carriacou and Petite Martinique, two of the three islands that make up the country, bore the brunt of the natural disaster.